Managing fraud and abuse of free products is a challenge that nearly every SaaS company contends with, but too often the perceived solution is to simply end free accounts. We’ve seen this happen time and again across the open-source ecosystem, most recently from Heroku, and we fear this comes at the detriment of the community.
We believe we’ve found a better way to solve this problem and are therefore committed to maintaining free PythonAnywhere accounts for the foreseeable future. Yes, this does cost us money and we do need to handle fraud and abuse, but over the 10 years we’ve been running we’ve found that the benefits to the community and to the service itself outweigh the costs.